Islam, philosophy and the West

A millennium-old argument
Blaming the problems of Islamic education on one great thinker is a bit uneducated

Erasmus Apr 22nd 2015 by B.C.

A THOUSAND years ago, Baghdad presented an extraordinary scene: a city of a

million people, the centre of a Muslim realm which stretched from Spain to Central
Asia, and an intellectual market-place where people of different philosophical and
religious schools met and debated, with unpredictable results. So perhaps we
shouldn't be too surprised that some of the controversies which raged in 11th-century
Baghdad are resurfacing now.

At the centre of today's disagreements is a thinker called Abu Hamid al-Ghazali,

whom many Muslims regard as the greatest philosopher their faith has produced. His
life had a worldly, metropolitan phase, and a mystical one. In 1095, he abandoned the
top theological job in Baghdad. As Carole Hillenbrand, an Edinburgh University
professor puts it, the position he left was equivalent to being archbishop of Canterbury
and a senior professor of theology at Oxford University. Over his remaining 16 years,
much of his time was spent as a humble, wandering pilgrim through holy places like
Damascus and Jerusalem or in solitary prayer. As his mystical life deepened, he
became one of the fathers of Sufism.

Especially since September 2001, the name of al-Ghazali has provoked heated reactions,
sometimes intelligent and subtle, sometimes less so. Last month, one of Britain's
favourite public intellectuals, Melvyn Bragg, invited three Western al-Ghazali scholars,
including Ms Hillenbrand, to a gloriously cerebral radio debate in which they teased
out al-Ghazali's polemical relationship with the philosophers of ancient Greece. (Yes,
British radio is different from American talk radio.) All the participants were admirers
of al-Ghazali, in the sense that they considered his work worthy of deep study. But at
its worst, argument about the Persian-born thinker descends into name-calling.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, an American astrophysicist and populariser of

science, excoriates al-Ghazali as the man who destroyed intellectual inquiry in the
Islamic world, comparable in his view to the anti-scientific blockheads of the
American religious right. In an otherwise intelligent book, which I review for the
current print edition, Ayaan Hirsi Ali calls al-Ghazali the forefather of today's violent
fanatics. Richard Dawkins, a British atheist intellectual, is another Ghazali-basher.

In modern Europe, people have been disagreeing about al-Ghazali for a couple of
centuries. Eduard Sachau, a German Orientalist who died in 1945, called the Muslim
thinker an obscurantist "but for [whom] the Arabs might have been a nation of
Galileos, Keplers and Newtons." But George Henry Lewes, a Victorian British historian
of ideas, took a different view: he said Rene Descartes, the Frenchman who declared "I
think therefore I am" was following al-Ghazali so closely that he would have been
accused of plagiarism if the Muslim thinker were better known.

For anyone who, like Mr Tyson, professes to believe in honest intellectual inquiry, it is
surely worth delving a bit more deeply into the thought of a man who was credited
with one of the greatest minds of his era, and who produced 70 books with a huge
variety of style and content. Perhaps the first point to make is that as one of the
masters of Sufism, the mystical strain of Islam, al-Ghazali could hardly be further from
today's violent fundamentalists; they loathe Sufism. Fundamentalists generally loathe
any religious path which promises the believer direct experience of the divine, and
hence can undermine religious authorities. Nor would today's Sunni Muslim
extremists much care for al-Ghazali's assertion that law is designed to serve a purpose
which is greater than any individual precept; violent types tend to be fanatics for the
letter of the law as they interpret it.

A more interesting question is where al-Ghazali fits in the history of Western thought.
He was wrestling with the exactly same problem as his Christian contemporaries: the
fact that there are fundamental differences between Semitic monotheism and the
world-view of ancient Greek thinkers, like Plato and Aristotle. It is true that compared
with other Islamic thinkers, he was more insistent in asserting monotheism and
therefore more critical of Aristotle; but Christians also had some differences with
Aristotle, and it can be argued that al-Ghazali was rejecting his fellow Muslims'
interpretation of Aristotle, not every single thing the Greek thinker had said.
Thomas Aquinas, one of the giants of medieval Western thought, was wrestling with
the same dilemmas as the Muslim sage, and the rich dialogue which had taken place
within the world of Islam clearly influenced him. Just like al-Ghazali, Aquinas had a
mystical experience which told him that intellectual speculation was much less useful,
as a path to God, than examining one's own heart and soul. But unlike the Muslim
thinker, Aquinas died soon after his mystical epiphany, so we don't know much about
where it took him. Al-Ghazali's spiritual autobiography is still read eagerly in the West
as well as the Muslim world.

For today's anti-Islamic polemicists, the next page in the story is a simple one: the
Christian West accepted Aristotle, and therefore became enlightened and progressive;
the Muslims rejected Aristotle and therefore sank into the mire. But that is just too
simple. Today's understanding of space, time and the emergence of the universe is at
least as far removed from Aristotle's static cosmological system as it is from any
religious narrative; sticking too closely to that system can easily become a form of
dogmatism in the worst sense. When the medieval Catholic church was persecuting
Galileo and Copernicus, it was doing so in the name of an Aristotelian view of the
universe. So accepting Aristotle certainly didn't make the medieval Vatican into a
paragon of reason and tolerance.

Al-Ghazali did not stop the Muslims doing science; they were producing decent
mathematicians and astronomers for a couple of centuries after his death; and he does
seem to have stimulated Western philosophy. When Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) invited
people to take a bet on the existence of God, he was (consciously or otherwise) closely
following an argument made by the Islamic philosopher five centuries earlier.

A broader point is this. If you are really determined to reduce the intellectual history
of the world into a simple contest of goodies and baddies, you can certainly find
grounds to demonise al-Ghazali. You can also find grounds for burning the entire
works of Friedrich Nietzsche because directly or indirectly he may have inspired the
Nazis. But to denounce al-Ghazali as an enemy of rational inquiry, and then refuse to
investigate in any depth what he actually said, is itself a way of rejecting the spirit of
rational inquiry.